Versions of Simplicity: Review Essay

On the path
to simplicity, who can quarrel with the advice of Joe Dominguez and
Vicki Robin in Your Money or Your Life: quit shopping, control debt, develop
"financial intelligence." Nor with their rehabilitation of the meaning of
frugality as a golden mean, a sufficiency of material things balanced with an
enjoyment of their virtues. Nor even with the equation "money equals life
energy" and the need to realize how much of one's life and energy goes into the
acquisition and use of money.

But the pragmatism of this approach quickly makes frugality an end
to itself. Restoring control of spending once achieved using the book's
nine-step program, the reader's efforts soon devolve into a miser's game of
scrimping. The authors offer advice such as cutting out coupons, attending cheaper
matinee movies, or hosting pot-luck instead of dinner parties. Cutting out
coupons for junk food? And who watches current movies anyway? Or puts on "parties"?
These are rote formulas for tightwads and eccentrics, not advice for someone who
has left all this behind and is seeking deeper roots to simplicity.

Most books on simplicity (or "voluntary simplicity" to use Duane
Elgin's 1981 book title) never rise about the level
of seeking more clever ways to consume. The simplicity advisors undermine themselves by the desire
to coexist -- even cooperate with -- modern culture. They skirt the crass commercialism
but never challenge the ethos of the culture itself or not enough to ascend to
some universal principles behind the idea of simplicity. Hence the paradoxical titles and
subtitles of so many of the books recommending simplicity. For example:

Simple Abundance

1,500 Simple Ways to Make Your Life Easy and Content

32 Ways to Do Less and Accomplish More

Frugal Luxuries

100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things that Really Matter

Simple Pleasures: Soothing Suggestions and Small Comforts for Living
Well

All of these well-meaning titles surely reflect Thoreau's familiar observation
that the mass of people "lead lives of quiet desperation." Are those
seeking simplicity not among them?

Is today's simplicity movement but a mild hedonism seeking surreptitious ways of
substituting the pleasures denied them by the conspicuous wealthy and powerful? Do
those in the movement want to consume
at the same rate but just can't afford to do so?

The simplicity books do not go to the
core of spiritual or psychological change. In contrast, Thoreau used the phrase
"voluntary poverty" (in the first chapter of Walden), identifying a philosophy
of simplicity with sages ancient and modern. "Evangelical poverty" is the
historical Christian equivalent; in Hinduism, aparigraha means not just
simplicity but "non-possessiveness." And from Taoism to Buddhism and beyond, there
is no dearth of philosophical and spiritually-minded models for simplicity. These
models are never built into the core of the popular
simplicity books because that would challenge the prevailing assumptions of
modern culture, and we may suspect that their readers really don't want to go that far.

The contradictions of simplicity are at the heart of our task to acquire wisdom.
In the Western world, for example, yoga and meditation are
increasingly marketed not to change a person's life but to make it easier to
carry on with it, relieving the stress that makes the rat race so hard to run. This is not to deny the benefits of stress management, for many
people do achieve incremental changes that lead to a more open mind and heart.
But as long as the premises of our culture are challenged only as excesses and
not as false premises, a person will not achieve a breakthrough in thinking or
daily living.

Are hermits and solitaries therefore immune from what a public media series has called "affluenza"?
Perhaps solitaries have a couple of minimum insights. First, that consumption is a
very social phenomenon: keeping up with one's neighbors or colleagues,
jealous and envious competition, that it is essentially a social and contrived behavior. Secondly, most
consumption is psychological: to assuage a hurt, to relieve stress, to serve as
self-reward, to indulge a desire for pleasure or greed.

These insights can be more readily available to those who value solitude than
for those who do not. And this solitude must not be merely a pragmatic tool the
way yoga and meditation are too often being used.

Best Intentions

Unfortunately, the path of simplicity by the best-intentioned use of solitude
may not be very convincing. Consider Paul Huston in The Holy Way: Practices
for the Simple Life. The cover of the book is invitingly reflective but the
content is crammed with anecdotes, opinions and misgivings about very basic
practices and attitudes.

Huston writes ten chapter representing ten virtues for the path (reminiscent of
the eight-fold noble path of Buddhism; Huston is a Catholic convert from
Lutheranism):

Solitude

Silence

Awareness

Purity

Devotion

Right livelihood

Confidence

Integrity

Generosity

Tranquility

Huston then chronicles her experiments in each category, using a human model
such as the hermit for solitude, the monk for silence, the contemplative for
tranquility, etc. They are experiments in that her busy life (as wife, mother,
professor, etc.) never affords her time or space for these practices, which she
now realizes are not just abstractions.

Huston admits that she is too gregarious for
solitude, too chatty for silence, and that her model for contemplative, whose photograph
she finds too "New-Agey," is Bede Griffiths, hardly the easiest model for
a
contemplative. Tossing up occasional block quotes from a desert father or Gospel
commentator interspersed with household doings and snippets of daily life never
gets Huston close to defining simplicity for herself or her readers, only looking at
it from afar.

To a degree the simplicity Huston advocates means increased study and faith, but
following her prescription does not work for everyone nor change the context of
society. But while the spirit is willing the flesh is weak. Huston seems to
conclude ambiguously that the need to travel the whole path is itself a bitter
gift.

QUAKERISM

Quakerism ought to promise a tradition and clearer commitment to simplicity. A
popular book, A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service and
Common Sense, by Robert Lawrence Smith, does refine the ten virtues of Huston
and make them ten foundations:

Silence

Worship

Truth

Simplicity

Conscience

Nonviolence

Service

Business

Education

Family

Smith tells us that to Quakers, simplicity follows the form of worship.
However,

If I were asked to define Quaker simplicity in a nutshell, I would say that
it has little to do with how many things you own and everything to do with not
letting your possessions own you.

But is this not the typical rationale that the wealthy and the "haves" offer
to defend not merely possessions but luxuries? "My possessions don't possess
me," people will insist, even people far from wealthy.

Is this really Quakerism?
Ironically, Smith has to quote Thoreau and Montaigne to clarify his intention,
meaning that despite his critique of shopping and material excess, he does not
speak as plainly as his Quaker ancestor John Woolman, who wrote in the 1750's of the commerce
of his day:

How lamentable is the present corruption of the world! How impure are the
channels through which trade is conducted!

Of course, Woolman was thinking of slavery, but can we say that the premises
of economics has changed since then?

Scott Savage, author of A Plain Life and editor of A Plain Reader:
Essays on Making a Simple Life, is a bit more down to earth than Smith --
who runs the Sidwell Friends School in northwest Washington, D.C., a decidedly
un-simple place. Like Huston, Savage is a convert, but to Quakerism, and more
specifically to a "plain" version akin to the practices of Amish. So he and his
wife have, as he puts it,

gone from being dual-income-no-kids urban professionals to being Amish-like
rural folk with a third of the money, a tenth of the possessions, and a
household of blessed children.

CONCLUSION

Presumably simplicity will come easier, both materially and spiritually, when
physical circumstances help reinforce values, whether in a physical setting like
wilderness, a rural homestead, or urban/suburban solitude. This is the
opportunity of the Amish and the homesteaders of today. This was the experience of
the Chinese recluses centuries ago, who were not automatically hermits because
they brought their entire families into the reclusion of village or mountain life. Physical
circumstances conducive to simple habitat is at a premium throughout the modern
world.

The key factor to simplicity is not so much the material circumstances,
however, as the integrity of the person. Not to say that Smith's objections to
his possessions not possessing him are valid. Rather, integrity must be measured
by our progress toward sustainable living. At any given time the material
circumstances will vary among well-intended individuals, and fluctuate even in
the progress of one person. We will not be able to judge, therefore, on a
snapshot but on a continuum. Even then, there will always be someone who has
more possessions than us (inviting our pride in our supposed simplicity) but
also always someone with less (inviting guilt and despair in the possibility of
progress in integrity).

A clear set of values, as a tradition
or as an personal assemblage of perennial wisdom, obviously helps on the path to
simplicity, but the integrity of the individual may be unconscious or
understated. Yet it is the only standard. Indeed, integrity may
come later than outward signs of simplicity. So, as the Zen masters say: start practicing, then see what
happens.

Possessions are projections of the self. In turn,
possessions contribute to our
psychological state. Rather than manipulate our possessions and become experts in aesthetics, as magazines like
Real Simple or books about Zen design suggest, we should begin pursuing simplicity
as a philosophy of life.

The ancients counseled a reduction of ego and self first (i.e., "practice"),
which then made it easier to reduce possessions and possessiveness. Slowly,
simplicity can blossom in our lives without consulting the well-meaning but
half-hearted efforts of writers on simplicity who still think in terms of
whether we are still able to partake of modern culture instead of thinking in
terms of integrity.